Share “George F. Will: On immigration, ghosts of...”

George F. Will: On immigration, ghosts of Christmas past

Oklahoman
Published: May 12, 2013

Advertisement

WASHINGTON — Charles Dickens' “A Christmas Carol” is a gooey confection of seasonal sentiment. It also is an economic manifesto that Dickens hoped would hit with “twenty thousand times the force” of a political tract. It concerned a 19th-century debate that is pertinent to today's argument about immigration.

Last week, a disagreement between two conservative think tanks erupted when the Heritage Foundation excoriated the immigration reform proposed by a bipartisan group of eight senators. Heritage's analysis argues that making 11 million illegal immigrants eligible, more than a decade from now, for welfare state entitlements would have net costs (benefits received minus taxes paid) of $6.3 trillion over the next 50 years.

Fifty-year projections about this or that are not worth the paper they should never have been printed on — think of what 1963 did not know about 2013. Why, then, Heritage's 50-year time horizon? Because 50 years of any significant expenditure is an attention-getting number. And because for more than a decade legalized immigrants would be a net fiscal plus, paying taxes but not receiving benefits.

Conservatives correctly criticize those who reject “dynamic scoring” of tax cuts. Such a calculation of the revenue effects of cuts includes assumptions about the effect on economic growth from changed behavior in response to the cuts — especially increased investment and consumption. Opponents of dynamic scoring usually are opponents of tax cuts. Similarly, opponents of increased immigration downplay what Cato stresses — immigration's energizing effects.

Which brings us to Dickens' revolt against Thomas Malthus' pre-capitalist pessimism about the possibility of growth and abundance. “A Christmas Carol” expresses Dickens' modernist rejection of Malthus' theory that population always grows faster than the food supply, so the poor must always be numerous and miserable.

When told that many of the poor “would rather die” than go to the workhouse, Scrooge replies: “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” But when Scrooge recognizes that Tiny Tim might be part of this surplus, he repents, giving Tim's father, Bob Cratchit, a raise and a Christmas turkey. This was Dickens' representation of the modern triumph of economics over fatalism about social stasis.